PJ O’Rourke on Legislators & Other Stuff

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

P. J. O’Rourke

Patrick Jake “P. J.” O’Rourke is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O’Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio’s game show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s.

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

He is the author of 17 books, of which his latest, Holidays in Heck, was released November 1, 2011. This was preceded on September 21, 2010, by Don’t Vote!-It Just Encourages the Bastards, and on September 1, 2009, Driving Like Crazy.

Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.

According to a 60 Minutes profile, he is also the most quoted living man in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations.

O’Rourke was a proponent of Gonzo journalism; one of his earliest and best-regarded pieces was “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”, a National Lampoon article in March 1979.

In 2009, O’Rourke described the Presidency of Barack Obama as “the Carter administration in better sweaters”.

Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system.

Seriously, how can anyone not appreciate the work of anyone who can publish a piece titled “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”?